


Close Encounters

by Sparkmender (Nattlys)



Series: Close Encounters AU [1]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Faebug AU, Historical References, Multi, here goes nothing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29317536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nattlys/pseuds/Sparkmender
Summary: It’s Monday night— the last Monday night before the end of the world, not that anyone knows it— and there are two blue, pupil-less eyes staring at her through her bedroom window.
Relationships: Bumblebee & Charlie Watson, Carly Witwicky/Spike Witwicky, Memo/Charlie Watson
Series: Close Encounters AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153496
Comments: 9
Kudos: 9





	1. An Average Tuesday

**Author's Note:**

> This has been cooking for like a year and a half in the back of my brain and I need to either put things down on the internet for other people to goggle at or literally explode. :'D

It’s Monday night—

The last Monday night before the end of the world, not that anyone knows it—

And there are two blue, pupil-less eyes the size of the headlights on her beat up VW Beetle staring at her through her bedroom window.

They blink out almost as soon as Charlie twitches. Whatever it was probably got spooked off by the fact that she jolted upright in bed and stared right back at it, compelled by— _something_. That feeling of being watched. The remnants of a nightmare. Whatever.

If whatever the eyes belonged to made noise as it departed, she couldn’t hear it over the buzz of the heavy fan her mom helped her drag into the big bedroom when she moved in to the old Ochoco house. It might as well not’ve been there at all.

Except for the fact that she _saw_ it, and all the hair on the back of her neck and along her arms stood like she’d rubbed a balloon over herself to see the static electricity.

Lots of things had been a little _weird_ since yesterday, though. Especially in the upper Northwest. It’s not exactly every day that a volcano goes off in the United States. Even if Oregon is a state away from Washington, Sunday had been stressful, to say the least. Some part of her had anticipated another explosion at some point. Guillermo had teased her for being a worry-wart and then started listing off all sorts of possibly apocalyptic events from most to least likely on his fingers. He got to 'alien robots who disguise themselves as kitchen appliances' before Charlie threw a shoe at him.

Under the quilt next to her, Guillermo sleeps as he always does, an arm shoved under his ridiculous stack of pillows and his long legs tangled in more than his fair share of the sheets.

Maybe it’s all in her head. Dreams were supposed to be how the brain processed stuff that happened during the day, right? So.

So she’s _not crazy_. It’s just her brain trying to make sense of the whole active volcano thing compounded by childhood fears and the well-ingrained camping habit of keeping an ear out for bears trying to pilfer your supplies.

...Probably.

Charlie doesn’t sleep the rest of the night, or she could have _sworn_ she hadn’t, but between this blink and the next the alarm is going off on the nightstand and Memo’s already in the kitchen, fighting with the coffee maker he can’t stand to get rid of because he bought it with his first paycheck from his magazine gig. (Who knew speculative sci-fi nerd writing not only paid, but paid well, with the right kind of publisher?) If he’d heard anything in the night, he doesn’t mention it.

After pulling her socks on but before shoveling flapjacks into her mouth, the eyes are forgotten.

If they’d ever existed at all.

* * *

In fact, the eyes _remain_ forgotten all the way until her third break of the day, hanging out with two of the older rangers who’d come back to the main office after clearing out a couple of downed trees off the Crater Lake hiking trail. Samson Jr.— who usually went by ‘Spike’— was a lanky, shaggy brunet a few years older than Charlie who still got carded at every bar they went to, with a permanent sunburn across the bridge of his nose and a personality so sunny it bordered on obnoxious. On the other hand, his father, Samson Sr., was a warm, stocky man who worked construction before throwing his lot in with parks and recreation and could have been anywhere from his mid 40s to his late 60s. They’d both been there when Charlie had started as an intern in college and were probably both going to still be there if she ever decided to leave or get transferred somewhere warmer, like California, or something.

She liked the both of them. Samson was more of a family figure to her than her stepdad Ron, and he’d helped her get a permanent spot on the team. Sometimes she and Memo went out with Spike and his girlfriend Carly, and Memo and Spike had more than a few interests in common. Mainly _Star Wars_ , but also stuff like He-Man and tabletop games and computers. Most of it went over Charlie’s head— she’d grown up a music nerd thanks to Dad and a car fanatic thanks to Uncle Hank, never much one for pulp fiction— but she and Carly enjoyed teasing the two of them for being ‘Oregon’s own X-Files department.'

So it wasn’t exactly surprising when Spike brought up his perennial fixation, Bigfoot theories, again.

“I don’t know,” he’d started, mouth full of half of a Snickers bar as he waved the other end of it around for emphasis. “I don’t know. But I don’t think that those trees just fell over for no reason. I mean, there were some aftershocks from the eruption, right? But nothing out here. It kind of looked more like some kind of impact hit them, sort of like a boulder had rolled down the hill and toppled ‘em over. But that doesn’t make any sense either, since there’s no loose rocks large enough to knock over three whole fir trees on that side of the trail. Maybe it was a Sasquatch. I bet they mark their territory by brushing up against trees like the bears do, and this one just got over-enthusiastic.”

Samson snatched the other half of the candy bar before Spike could accidentally smack Charlie with it, just to toss it back into the basket of goodies on the windowsill again.

“First of all, stop raiding the candy stash. That’s for visitors, and last I checked, you haven’t been a visitor since you were 16,” the older man scolded, but he couldn’t quite keep the amusement off his face— Spike had to have gotten his good spirits from somewhere. “And something tells me that if there really _was_ a ‘sat-squash’ or whatever it is, it probably wouldn’t be hanging around where there’s regular humans coming and going all day, every day. At least if it knew what was good for it. It was just a regular tree fall, it’s been cleared, and now we’ve got more firewood for the campers.”

Though mourning the loss of his candy, Spike was quick to poke a finger in the air triumphantly at Samson.

“Okay, but how do you explain the _fur clumps_ we found scattered there, huh? Way softer than any regular sort of wild animal.”

Charlie had been absently nodding along to their pseudo-argument, only to perk up at Spike’s outburst, dropping the pen she’d been fiddling with. And then curse herself out silently as both of the older rangers turned to her at the way she’d reacted. In the back of her head, she remembered: that split-second glimpse of those unnaturally big eyes, framed by fluff and set into a broad, flat face.

“Uh.”

Spike grinned.

“See? Charlie agrees with me—”

“She said ‘ _uh,_ ’ Junior, that’s not an agreement—”

“I mean, _maybe,_ ” she blurts out before she can stop herself, heat flushing her face at the outburst, awkwardly picking up the pen she’d dropped to snap the cap over it again. “I don’t know what’s out there. You know what they tell us when we start ranger training; don’t go off the trails.”

God, it’s like Charlie can’t help herself, suddenly, as superstitious and paranoid as one of the characters Memo would write into his stories. It was all just stuff the trainers would tell them to haze the kids starting out, the sort of shit teenagers joked about or camp councilors made up to freak out their campers. None of it was actually true. But in another life, maybe, to someone more interesting or smarter or less lucky (or _luckier,_ some stupid impulse wants to say) than Charlie—

For a moment, vivid and shining, Charlie felt some spark of pure terror in her.

The thing in her bedroom window. Was it still near her house? Was she going to come home to find Guillermo missing, or _worse?_

“Sure, some of it is just common sense safety guidelines, but what about the weirder ones? The rules about not climbing random staircases in the woods— don’t stop to listen to any music if you’re not near a registered campsite, like that’s ever been a thing? Or never telling someone you meet without gear on a trail what your name is? I mean, there’s got to be some kind of a _reason_ for these things, or else we wouldn’t all have them hammered into our skulls over the course of three years,” she rambles, pulse thudding in her ears. “Nobody makes up how-tos about things for no reason.”

In the quiet pause in conversation that followed, Charlie felt the embarrassed burn on her face spread to her ears and creep down the back of her neck.

“…Or it’s an opportunistic raccoon?” she squeaks out.

“Probably a raccoon. _Damn._ ” Spike finally relents, shoulders slumping with a dejected sigh. He really looks genuinely disappointed, soon ambling over to drape himself over Charlie’s desk in the hopes of some sympathy pats as Samson chuckles in the background about how today’s cinema is rotting everybody's brains out their ears.

* * *

Nobody notices the candy basket on the windowsill going missing as they head back out to do rounds of the campgrounds.


	2. Incident Report

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An intercepted incident report archived for documentation purposes by Sector 7.

[ TRANSCRIPT OF IMAGE ABOVE ]

_CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK_

_INCIDENT REPORT:_ 05/19/1980

 _SUBJECT:_ Seismic activity damages report

 _FILED BY:_ Samson Witwicky Sr.

  * Three downed Douglas firs on the east bank side of the Crater Lake trail documented in the first report filed yesterday.
  * Small rockslide blocking access to wildflower trail.
  * Two true firs cracked but still mostly standing close to campground. Might need removal.
  * Some sort of sinkhole/impact on the old horse trail. Couldn’t get close enough to look with the sun setting. Going to return tomorrow.



The rockslide on the wildflower trail means the apiary’s been blocked off from the southern approach. Spike and Charlie are going to go around and try to see if there’s been more significant damage to the trail by going around the western approach tomorrow.

Not sure if I should file another report for this or not, but the wildlife has been reacting unexpectedly since Sunday with the quakes and then the eruption from Mt. St. Helens up in Washington. We’re usually no strangers to the occasional quake or rockslide, but around that sinkhole and near the rockslide on the wildflower trail it’s dead quiet. That’s unusual for mid-May, especially with the warmer weather we’ve been having lately.

Between the eruption, the tree falls, and the rockslide, we’re lucky its not the weekend. The few campers still here are old local regulars who know these woods as well as we do, but I’ve warned them to stay off the horse trail for now.

Might need to get an animal specialist out here, though. Spike keeps finding clumps of shed fur that don’t match any of the big species out here, and some kind of odd scratching pattern on some of the trees near the sinkhole that we don’t have on record.


	3. Long Way Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over the river and through the woods...

She might be speeding. Just a little.

The occasion called for it, in her opinion, but what was she supposed to tell a cop if she was pulled over? ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Officer, I just want to get home and make sure my boyfriend hasn’t been eaten alive by some sort of massive prehistoric gorilla creature?’

The winding road back down to town felt impossibly long as it stretched out before her, branches and tree trunks whipping past and morphing into one long oppressive blur. Even the radio, tuned to some inane early evening talkshow broadcast with its meaningless chatter and happy voices, wasn’t doing anything to calm her down.

Charlie gripped the steering wheel of her Bug a little tighter, enough to make the skin of her knuckles turn pale, to keep her hands from trembling. Samson had mentioned he was going to fill out an incident report on their way back over to the office, especially since if that sinkhole they’d spotted really was as large as it looked they were going to need to get some heavy-duty equipment out to figure out what was going on with it.

There were the other broken trees to consider, too, and more of those clumps of fur, but what had caught Charlie’s attention— and yet had only gotten the briefest of glances from Samson and which Spike hadn’t even stopped to look at— were the scratches in the ground and on some of the boulders and surrounding trees not only around the wildflower patch but on most of the path leading up to where the rockslide happened.

Whatever had made those marks was doing it on purpose. There was no other explanation. The scratches were repeating themselves, some sort of half-wild writing, maybe, but they were definitely meant as a message. And it was a message Charlie was desperate not to know the meaning of, because something deep in the lizard part of her brain knew whatever it was, it probably wasn’t going to be a _friendly greeting_.

And Samson was going to send her out tomorrow morning to check on the apiary up there like he hadn’t even seen anything other than the unfortunate tumble of shale and granite in the way.

Despite every fibre of her flight or fight response screaming at her to run home and grab Memo and catch the next flight back to Colorado, she knew she’d have to go. If not, it wasn’t unlikely that some civilian camper might wander out too far and… not come back. At least Spike would be with her. God, she missed college; the Rockies themselves might have been unforgiving at times, but they were beautiful, and she missed being within an hour’s drive of the ski slopes on the weekends.

Oregon had mountains, sure, and Mt. Bachelor’s slopes, but Mt. Bachelor wasn’t _Aspen_.

Something bellowed further down the road, out of the range of her headlights, sounding like an elk. Charlie slowed almost to a crawl at the noise, not a stranger to spotting some of the deer or moose wandering across the old two-lane road but not particularly eager to have to engage with any of them. Moose especially could be stubborn, and she didn’t have the time to linger on waiting for it to either get a move on or go back the way it came. It was already past dusk, so Memo was probably starting to put the latest article he’d written down for the night so he could get a start on reheating the leftover spaghetti bolognese Charlie had prepped for them both on Saturday and frozen in the nice tupperware she’d had to order from a catalogue.

He’d been childishly excited about getting to pick out the jar of spaghetti sauce when they went shopping together. The memory of it was almost enough to keep her on just this side of the speed limi—

And then _something_ huge and black and _purple_ and **_screaming_** hit the passenger side of her car with a deafening shatter of both windows and half of her windshield, the sudden impact jolting her forward against her seatbelt and causing it to jam hard across her chest as her head thumped back against the headrest with a dull _thwack_. She had just enough time to scream _back_ at it before her Volkswagen was forced off the road proper, the hood crumpling on impact with the rock shelf to the left and giving out with a pathetic, strained groan.

“ ** _Shit!_** Shit, _shit—_ ”

Between the sudden lack of light and the seatbelt strap digging into her and refusing to disengage, Charlie was practically a sitting duck if whatever the _fuck_ that screaming thing was decided to take another pass at her, and she couldn’t see or hear it and hadn’t seen where it went but from the brief split-second look she’d gotten of it the thing had looked like a massive, mutated wasp with a human face and _huge wasps with human faces were not a thing that existed._

There was that strange sound again, much closer, definitely not a moose, and the seatbelt unlocked and Charlie threw herself out of the car just in time for the… the _wasp-person_ to make a charge at the Beetle again, slamming down on the roof in a furious rush of limbs and wings. She could barely make sense of it in the rapidly deepening dark of the woods, only belatedly realizing some of the glass from the initial impact had cut into her arm and thigh when she felt the hot seep of blood down the side of her pants leg.

 _Goddamn it_ , she only has two of these uniforms.

As the violent thing thrashed against the car and punched through the remains of the windshield, the horn went off, which enraged the massive purple and black insect more— it was intent on pulling the car apart, as far as Charlie could tell, but it _was_ completely ignoring the fleshy, bleeding passenger the Volkswagen had spat out. Distantly, Charlie realized the creature was— speaking, _shouting_ , something, but if the hissing and rounded consonants and clicks were a language it was flowing over her like water, incomprehensible beneath the buzz of massive, beating insect wings and the dying splutters of her poor Beetle.

At least, it was ignoring her until she rolled over and tried to push herself up, but her leg wasn’t having any of it and Charlie gasped despite herself, and the wasp-monster _froze._

On her knees and probably concussed and definitely losing blood, she swayed, staring up at surprisingly frightened red eyes in return. They were huge and luminous and bizarrely humanoid in a face that, otherwise, was entirely alien; the wasp-person’s (wasp… man’s? wasp lady’s? Actually, _who cared_ ) bottom jaw split down the middle into wicked looking mandibles, which twitched and scraped against each other as it jerked back and fled off into the canopy.

What right did this thing have to be afraid of _her?_ It had appeared out of midair, screaming, and wrecked the car she’d spent most of her teenage years saving up for! All _she’d_ done is scream back at it and bleed a little! 

It was gone, anyway, leaving Charlie stranded in the middle of the road with the remains of her Beetle and strange, floating flickers in front of her eyes, like static on the television set.

That’s probably shock setting in, actually. She had classes about first aid, but she can’t remember any of it now, not in the moment when she’s the one hurt and everything feels like it’s happening thirty feet away and underwater. There wasn’t anything to be done about it, other than using the intact door of the Volkswagen to pull herself up so she can strip her uniform shirt off and tear the mostly shredded sleeve free to use it as a makeshift tourniquet while keeping her eyes open in case the—

Winged person… thing. It shimmered, even in the low moonlight, and it made her head ache, but she keeps getting stuck on the eyes. First the blue ones in her window, now the red ones, and there’s some sort of weird glitter all over everything. Charlie sniffles, fighting off the urge to rub her face in favor of yanking the flashlight off of her belt to hold it up.

The glittery dust smeared near the cut on her arm from how she pulled herself up tingles, a little, and as she watches it the cut clots over into an angry looking scab.

Charlie nearly drops the flashlight.

“What the hell. What the _hell_ , is this _pixie dust?_ This isn’t happening. Okay, I hit my head harder than I thought when I hit some kind of animal and now I’m dying. I’m dying and nobody’s even going to find my dead body until tomorrow morning. Go Charlie, hallucinating some kind of fucked-up fairy in the middle of dying!” She seethed, but seeing as she wasn’t _immediately,_ like, actively dying, and there didn’t seem to be any other problems with the snarled-looking scab on her arm other than the fact that it looked kind of awful… Leaning against the rock wall her Beetle had been thrown into, Charlie grits her teeth and feels around the cut in her leg to pull out a— smaller than she’d thought, bigger than she’d hoped— shard of glass before swiping her other hand over the roof of her ruined car and slapping the palmful of gathered glitter onto the gash.

This is the stupidest thing she’s ever done, but honestly? It was try this and limp back to the base and campground or sit here and bleed out, or worse, deal with the _Tooth Fairy_ coming back and finishing her off.

The air rushes out of her lungs in a low huff but… It doesn’t hurt. The warm, slippery feeling tapers off, at least, and even if she can’t get herself to look down at it just gently prodding at it confirms that it sealed the wound closed.

Right. No idea how she’s going to explain this to an EMT.

Or Memo.

_What the hell was she going to tell Memo?_

Her flashlight flickered worryingly. Charlie bit her lip, looking over the wreck that had once been her Volkswagon. Nothing to be done for it, or taken _from_ it, really. She’d refused to so much as keep snacks in the glove compartment after finding bees under the hood, once.

“…Okay, then.”

The beam steadied and she straightened up as best as she could before setting off back the way she came, staring out at the branches— though something told her that if her fairy godmother was coming back, she’d hear that eerie, hollow sound again first.

Well, fine. Let it come back. Maybe she’ll scream at it again, but louder this time, and show it what for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP 1978 Volkswagon Beetle.


End file.
